Suzan-Lori Parks and Diane Paulus to Reimagine Gershwin Classic Porgy & Bess

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and composer Diedre Murray will be re-imagining George and Ira Gershwin’s classic opera Porgy and Bess as a musical under the direction of Diane Paulus. The show is scheduled to debut in September 2011 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Paulus serves as artistic director.

“Porgy and Bess has this incredible place in our lives as a classic opera now,” Paulus told The Boston Globe. “The idea here was to give it a life on a musical stage.” Giving it new life, she said, will require cutting Porgy down from its current length of four hours, taking it out of operatic form and developing the characters more fully, but she is unsure whether new music will be required.

Paulus is the Tony-nominated director of the recent Broadway revival of Hair, which she also helmed pre-Broadway at Shakespeare in the Park. She recently returned to Central Park to direct a concert of Paul Simon’s The Capeman, and has directed extensively in the opera world, with productions like Le Nozze Di Figaro, Turn Of The Screw, and Cosi Fan Tutte at Chicago Opera Theater among her credits.

Parks’ plays include The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Venus and TopDog/Underdog, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. Her play The Book of Grace was recently staged off-Broadway at the Public Theater, and she is writing the book for the upcoming Ray Charles musical Unchain My Heart. She is the recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant.

Murray is an Obie-winning composer and Pulitzer Prize finalist who collaborated with Paulus on Best of Both Worlds, a gospel/R&B adaptation of A Winter’s Tale, at ART last season. Other projects include the musical Sweet Billy and the Zooloo’s, with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage.

Porgy and Bess, which features music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward based on Porgy by Heyward and his wife Dorothy, includes such classics as "Summertime," "Bess, You Is My Woman Now," "I Got Plenty o' Nothin" and "It Ain't Necessarily So." Originally conceived as an American folk opera, it tells the story of Porgy, who lives in the slums of Charleston, South Carolina, and his attempts to rescue Bess from the clutches of Crown, her pimp, and Sportin' Life, a drug dealer.